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Boiled Leg of Mutton, with Caper Sauce
Put the mutton in a kettle, pour over it hot water sufficient to cover and add a cup of well washed rice, which will render the mutton whiter and more tender. When the water boils, skim it carefully, and allow it to boil rapidly fifteen minutes; then set the kettle where the boiling will be gentle but constant, and allow fifteen minutes to each pound, if the meat is desired rare. Serve with caper sauce.
A plain boiled joint of the sort that anchored English and American dinner tables, written for cooks who knew what caper sauce was and did not need to be told. Two things need translating: the meat itself, and the fact that the recipe never mentions salt or a thermometer.
- Mutton means lamb nowMutton is sheep over two years old, deeper in flavour and considerably tougher; almost no US supermarket carries it. A 5-6 lb bone-in leg of lamb behaves similarly but cooks faster and tastes milder, so expect a gentler dish than the book intended. Halal and West Indian butchers are the likeliest source of genuine mutton.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the first quarter hourThe hinge: keep it barely moving after the first quarter hour -- The fifteen minutes of rapid boiling sets the surface and drives out scum; the book then asks for boiling that is 'gentle but constant', which in practice means a bare shiver, somewhere around 180-185F, with the surface barely trembling. A hard boil for two hours squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you grey, stringy meat in a pot of good broth.
- What the rice is doingThe starch clouds the water and, in period thinking, kept the meat pale rather than allowing it to grey. It has no tenderising effect whatever, despite the claim. It does leave you with a starchy, faintly mutton-flavoured liquid that will not make a clean stock, so decide whether you want the whiteness or the broth.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundFor a 6 lb leg that is an hour and a half. Submerged in hot water that long, a modern lamb leg may still come out pink at the centre, but it can easily go further, so go by a thermometer at the thickest part away from the bone: 130-135F for rare, 145F for medium. Mutton proper wants far longer and slower — several hours — and is better treated as a braise than as a rare roast.
- Salt the waterThe recipe omits it entirely. Boiled meat unsalted from the outside tastes flat; use roughly a tablespoon of salt per gallon of water, plus an onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns if you want the liquid to be worth anything.
- Caper sauceCaper sauce of this period is a drawn-butter or white sauce — butter and flour cooked together, thinned with some of the cooking liquor or milk, with two or three tablespoons of drained capers and a little of their vinegar stirred in at the end. Add the capers off the heat so they keep their bite.
- YieldA 5-6 lb bone-in leg serves six to eight. Carve across the grain in thin slices, and serve on a hot dish — boiled meat goes cold and greasy faster than roast.
Boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce is one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, appearing in Eliza Acton, Mrs Beeton and nearly every American household manual that followed them, and it survived into The Butterick Cook Book (1911) largely by inertia. Capers — the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, imported from the Mediterranean — were an economical way to buy sharpness for a fatty, strongly flavoured meat. The rice trick belongs to a whole family of period instructions concerned with keeping boiled meat and poultry white, an aesthetic that mattered when a joint was carried whole to the table and judged on appearance. Mutton's disappearance from American butchers over the twentieth century, as sheep were bred and slaughtered younger for the lamb trade, is why this dish now reads as archaic while roast lamb does not.